Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Twenty-Two

The lead air van wore the colors of SINS—System Information and News Service, the Mobius System’s official government news agency—as it moved sedately down the broad canyon between the business towers that dominated downtown Landing. There was no obvious connection between it and the other pair of vans or the two somewhat battered looking private air cars, and all five vehicles were careful to obey all traffic signals as they made their way towards their various destinations.

Appearances could be deceiving, however, and the eleven men and seven women in the lead van sat grim and silent, final weapons checks completed, waiting for the carnage to come.

“Three minutes,” the driver said quietly over his shoulder.

None of the passengers replied. They didn’t have to. Everyone knew what his or her job was, just as all of them knew that a strike like this in the middle of the day was more than merely risky. In many ways, it approached the suicidal, yet that was one of the strengths of their plan. No one—not even that kill-crazy bitch Yardley—was going to see this one coming.

The glittering tower of the Trifecta Corporation loomed ahead of them. Trifecta held a special place in the hearts of the Mobius Liberation Front. It was scarcely among the great transstellars of the Solarian League—barely a bit-player compared to Technodyne or Zumwalt of Old Terra, really—but it still owned something like sixty percent of the Mobius planetary economy outright. It wasn’t shy about proclaiming the fact here in its private little preserve, either. The ivory-tinted Trifecta Tower—known to its owners as the “Silver Lady” and to most citizens of Mobius (privately, at least) as the “White Whore”—was the tallest structure on the entire planet. No pains had been spared to turn it into the sort of glittering showplace and monument to corporate grandeur an outfit Trifecta’s size could never have afforded, for many reasons, in the Core. It was a brazen statement that Mobius was Trifecta’s private preserve…and that everyone who lived there was effectively a Trifecta serf.

Well, the strike team’s leader thought grimly, our lords and masters are about to find out these serfs aren’t very happy with them. And they’re not going to be very happy with us in a few minutes.

“Here we go!” the driver said.

* * *

The SINS van shot forward, accelerating suddenly, turning out of its traffic lane and cutting across three others. Air cars and lorries swerved wildly as the rogue vehicle violated their airspace and the traffic control frequencies exploded with abrupt imprecations, controllers’ questions, and emergency orders.

The air van didn’t care about any of that. It simply altered course, climbing steeply, and arrowed straight into a restricted, high-security access point. The portal in the side of Trifecta Tower was specifically dedicated to the use of its senior executives. Entry by anyone else was strictly forbidden, and the eleven Trifecta Security personnel manning the access point had standing orders to use lethal force if anyone tried to break into it anyway. Unfortunately for Trifecta’s intentions, the people who’d planned this attack had been right in at least one respect; no one in his right mind would have expected anyone to launch an attack like this in the middle of the business day.

The security detail’s initial reaction was that they were looking at a traffic accident about to happen on a grand scale, courtesy of a drunk or somehow suddenly incapacitated driver. It was the only logical assumption, especially given the van’s livery, and before they could realize how wrong they were, the accelerating vehicle was right on top of them, the side windows had slammed abruptly open, and eighteen military-grade pulse rifles opened fire.

Despite their body armor, the security men never had a chance in the face of that much concentrated firepower. Most of them were killed outright. The three survivors were all badly wounded—all of them would quietly bleed to death eventually—and the van went scorching past them.

It was moving too rapidly to stop in the available space, but the strike leader had planned on that, as well. There was room for the vehicle to kill a lot of speed before it crashed into the assistant planetary operations manager’s parking stall, crumpling the last third of his limousine in on itself before it staggered to a halt. Specially reinforced shoulder harnesses and Solarian-manufactured combat helmets protected its passengers from the impact, and all of them bailed out instantly through the side doors.

Four of them moved quickly to the security station they’d just shot up. They ignored the dead and wounded, except to kick any personal weapons away from anyone who seemed to still be breathing, and shot open the lockers the Trifecta personnel hadn’t had time to get to. They dragged out the military-grade tribarrels—heavy enough to take down an armored stingship if they hit it right—which President Lombroso had personally authorized for Trifecta’s private security force and slammed them onto the swivel mounts built into the security office.

The rest of the strike force lunged for the emergency fire exits. The doors were locked, of course, but that had been anticipated, and incendiary charges turned the locks to slag. Shoulders rammed into the suddenly unlocked panels, smashing them open, and boots clattered on the risers as the attackers stormed up the old-fashioned stairs.

They burst into an expensive foyer just as the first security men came spilling out of the lift banks in response to the alarms. Security had the advantage of internal cameras and free flow communications links; the attackers had the advantage of knowing exactly what they were doing and where they were going to accomplish it. The result was that they were ready—and the security team wasn’t—when the lift doors opened. Pulser darts turned the two lift cars into abattoirs, and a grenade tossed into each of them made sure all of these bodies were dead.

Four more team members peeled off, covering the foyer, while the ten remaining attackers burst into the inner sanctum of the Trifecta Corporation.

“Down on the floor!” the team leader bellowed. “Down on the floor or die!”

The highly decorative receptionist and both of his assistants dived for the floor instantly, sliding under their desks and covering their heads with their arms. Aides and secretaries who didn’t have a clue what was happening poked their heads out of office doorways, gawking at the sudden eruption of roughly dressed, armed proles. Most of them got the message as quickly as the receptionist had. The faster ones popped back into their offices, like Old Terran prairie dogs. Others dropped to the floor, burying their noses in the expensive carpet. But—

“Who the fuck d’you think you are, you god—?!”

Both pulser darts took the red-faced man dead center as he came storming out of his office. The expanding anti-personnel darts tore through his body in a spray-painted red cloud, and he went down, furious question chopped off in mid-word as his lungs and heart shredded and most of his right shoulder blade disintegrated into splinters of finely separated bone.

There were lots of screams now, and the leader charged down the corridor with five other men and women as a third quartet peeled off to hold the foyer. He smashed his way through the ornate, expensive door at the end of the hall, and a pulser dart whined past his ear. One of his fellows’ head exploded under its impact, and he triggered a return burst that sawed the bodyguard standing in front of the huge desk almost in half.

The bodyguard went down, and the leader vaulted the desk. A richly dressed, wild-eyed woman cowered under it, both hands pressed to her mouth, expensively coiffured hair wildly awry, and he smiled coldly.

“I think you’d better come out, Ms. Guernicke,” he said.

* * *

Sirens howled all across the city of Landing. Public buildings went into lockdown. Corporate structures mustered their own armies of private security goons. Presidential Guard armored vehicles thundered into ground level and subsurface roadways. Stingships streaked into the air above the city, and unmanned reconnaissance platforms went swarming through the airspace around Trifecta Tower.

The traffic in the vicinity, obedient to the strident commands of City Traffic Control, cleared the area as quickly as possible. In the case of two nondescript vans (neither of which looked the least bit like the one which had crashed into Trifecta Tower), the fastest way to do that was to land. One set down hastily and awkwardly on the surface roadway a half-block down Trifecta Boulevard from the tower; the second landed on the ground level of a public parking garage directly across the street from it. Their drivers, who obviously had no desire to find themselves in the middle of what looked like turning into a free fire zone, locked their vehicles and took to their heels.

They were hardly alone in that. After the previous month’s riots, no Mobian was going to be stupid enough to hang around when the Presidential Guard could be expected momentarily. A mass exodus turned the busy downtown blocks into a ghost town in mere minutes, leaving streets, slide-walks, and aerial walkways to the security troops already storming into the area.

Six blocks from Trifecta Tower (in opposite directions), the pair of battered air cars swooped down just long enough to pick up the fleeing van drivers, then vanished into the city’s anonymity.

* * *

The communicator on Georgina Guernicke’s desk buzzed loudly. The strike leader looked at it for a moment, then pressed the voice-only acceptance key.

“Yes?”

“This is General Yardley,” a hard female voice said from the blank com. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Did you screen just to waste my time asking stupid questions?”

“You realize, of course, that none of you are getting out of this alive,” Yardley replied flatly.

“That’s possible,” the strike leader acknowledged. “We won’t go alone, though. In fact, I think the body count’s already in our favor.”

“The one who dies with the most kills is still dead,” Yardley shot back, and the leader surprised himself with a harsh chuckle.

“That’s clever, General. Cleverer than I would’ve expected out of a homicidal bitch like you. Do you really want to talk, or should I just hang up?”

“I presume you have some sort of demands to make. Why don’t you go ahead and make them so we can get it over with?”

“My demands are pretty simple, actually. You turn loose all of the innocent men and women you’ve arrested over the last two or three T-weeks and provide us with an air car, and Ms. Guernicke takes a little trip with us. You fulfill your side of the bargain, and we turn her loose alive and unharmed. You screw around with us, and Lombroso gets to explain to Trifecta why it’s going to need a new system operations manager here in Mobius.”

“No fucking way.” Yardley’s voice was even flatter than before. “You harm Ms. Guernicke in any way, and I promise you’ll take a long time dying.”

“That would suppose you managed to take any of this alive,” the leader responded. “Which isn’t going to happen. Mind you, we’d rather get out of this in one piece, but we’re okay with it either way. Your fucking Presidential Guard made sure of that last month. You know what I’ve got left to lose, General Yardley? Last month it would have been a wife, a teenaged daughter, and a ten-year-old son. Today? Well, I’ll let you guess.”

There was silence for a moment, and the leader heard Guernicke whimpering in terror as she crouched in a corner with a pistol barrel pressed to the side of her head. Once upon a time, his heart might have felt at least some pity for her, but that had been then, and this was now.

“Should I assume the rest of your murdering little band feels the same way?” Yardley asked finally.

“I’ve got you on speakerphone, General,” he replied, looking up to meet the others’ eyes. “You hear anybody disagreeing with me?”

“It’s still not going to happen,” Yardley shot back. “I let you go with Ms. Guernicke, and you’re not going to turn her loose. You’re going to hang onto her, and you’re going to keep on making demands that get steeper and steeper until there’s no way in hell you’re going to get what you ask for. And then you kill her anyway, and you blame it on us. I don’t think we’re going to play that game.”

“Up to you, General. But before you make up your mind—”

He beckoned to the woman holding the gun to Guernicke’s head, and she jerked the Trifecta executive to her feet and half-dragged, half-led her across to the desk. The leader looked at Guernicke for a moment, then pointed at the com terminal.

“For God’s sake, Yardley!” Guernicke screamed into the mike. “What the fuck are you thinking? Give these people whatever the hell they want!”

The leader nodded, and Guernicke was hauled back to her corner and shoved back onto her knees. He waited another moment, then turned back to the com himself.

“There you go—your mistress’ voice has spoken, General. Now you know she’s still alive, and you’ve got your marching orders. What’re you going to do? I don’t think Trifecta’s going to be very happy with you and Lombroso if she ends up dead in a firefight now that she’s told you what you’re supposed to do.”

The silence from the other end of the com link was profound.

* * *

“Jesus, General!” Colonel Tyler Braddock exclaimed. Colonel Braddock, who was very fond of his self-assigned callsign “Tiger,” was a good ten centimeters taller and far broader across the shoulders than Olivia Yardley. At the moment, his swarthy complexion was pale and sweat beaded his hairline. “They’ve really got Guernicke in there. What the fuck do we do now?!”

“Shut up, Colonel,” Yardley said in a flat, dangerous voice. Her hazel eyes were hard as she glared up at the taller Braddock. It was his Scorpions which had opened fire last month and touched off the May Riots, and she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable where he was concerned at the moment.

He looked down at her, opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again and nodded, and she snorted. At least the idiot had some sense of self-preservation.

“What we’re not going to do,” she told him then, “is let these bastards panic to us into promising them what they want. Not unless I can figure out a way to make it look like they’re actually getting it right up to the second we shoot them all in the head. If we let them out of that tower with Guernicke, this shit is just getting started. At the moment, we’ve got them penned up in there, and I want to make damned sure they aren’t going anywhere, so start moving your goddamned troops into position. And try not to kill anybody you don’t have to, this time!”

Braddock flushed angrily, but he kept his mouth shut, nodded, and climbed out of Yardley’s command vehicle. He stalked down the frozen slide-walk towards his own command post, and Yardley watched him go.

I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the bastards on the other side will manage to kill him for me, she reflected. I can always dream, though.

In the meantime, she had to figure out what she was going to recommend to President Lombroso, and she grimaced at the thought. The president wasn’t a lot happier with her than she was with Braddock, and this wasn’t going to help. Maybe she could figure out a way to make it an intelligence failure and put it all on Friedemann Mátyás? She’d have to think about that.

* * *

The parking garage on the far side of Trifecta Boulevard, the surface level street east of the corporate tower, offered an ideal staging area for Colonel Braddock’s Scorpions. Each Scorpion individually exceeded the maximum vehicle weight for the garage by about twenty percent, but there were only thirty of them. Distributed across four floors, their weight was more than sufficiently spread out. Better yet, the garage had accesses on both its east and west sides, which meant the AFVs could be moved into the garage from the west without anyone in Trifecta Tower seeing them.

One might have wondered how useful armored vehicles were going to be in a situation like this one, but over the last few weeks, it had become the Presidential Guard’s policy to deploy overwhelming force in order to overawe and terrify potential dissidents. Besides, it was always possible there was a ground assault element involved in this insane plan after all, and having the firepower on hand to deal with one if it came along seemed like a good thing.

Braddock personally supervised the movement of his vehicles into the garage, then moved his own command vehicle to the roof. The vehicle crew was clearly uncomfortable sitting out there in the open as they remembered the anti-tank launchers they’d encountered last month. Braddock didn’t care about that. First, because he doubted these bastards were going to escalate the confrontation by using heavy weapons (assuming they had any) any sooner than they had to. And, second, because he wasn’t in the command vehicle. He’d moved to a better vantage point just inside the ground-level entrance facing the Tower, maintaining his connection to the command vehicle on a secure frequency while its position on top of the garage gave it the best transmission reach he could come up with.

Now he keyed the mike.

“Command One,” he said, and waited for the earbug tone to tell him the communications computer had automatically patched him through to Yardley. “Command One, Tiger is in position,” he said then.

“Good,” Yardley replied.

* * *

The desk com buzzed again, and the strike leader punched the key.

“What can I do for you, General?”

“You could start by cutting your throats and saving me the effort,” Yardley suggested.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going anywhere without Guernicke and we’re planning on killing a lot more of you bastards before you ever get into this office. So shall we move on to your second suggestion?”

“Let Ms. Guernicke leave the building unharmed, and we’ll let you and the rest of your murderers withdraw unmolested.”

The leader laughed out loud.

“Oh, I don’t think so!” he half-chortled. “As fairy tales go, it’s not bad, but we stopped believing in the tooth fairy a long time ago. Try again.”

“All right, third option. You stay right where the fuck you are, we sit outside here, and we starve your asses out. How does that sound?”

“At least a little more like you’re telling the truth. On the other hand, we brought a fair amount of food with us. Of course, we won’t be able to share any of it with Ms. Guernicke or the other Trifecta employees in here with us, so they’ll probably get hungry—and dehydrated—a lot faster than we will. If you want to try it, though, more power to you.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started,” Yardley told him. “There’s always the possibility of knockout gas through the environmental systems. Or we send in SWAT teams. That’s a damned big tower, and you can’t begin to put fire teams everywhere you’d need to be to stop us. We can work our way around you, get our own teams in position, then blow our way through walls and floors to take you out.”

“Probably,” the strike leader acknowledged. “I’d say the chances of your pulling that off without our killing Ms. Guernicke before you get in here are no more than forty-sixty, though, and that’s if you wait a couple days, until fatigue and anxiety start dulling our alertness. Of course, that’s also assuming we’re willing to wait that long before we just go ahead and shoot the bitch. For that matter, we’ve got somewhere around fifty more Trifecta employees up here, most of them pretty damned senior, and we don’t especially like any of them, either. You want some of them airmailed back? They’ll make an awful mess when they hit the pavement without counter-grav.”

There was silence from Yardley’s end, and the strike leader leaned back in Guernicke’s sinfully comfortable chair.

“I’ve been informed by President Lombroso that you’re not getting your air car, and you’re not getting out of that building, without handing Ms. Guernicke over to us unharmed,” Yardley said finally. “That’s not negotiable.”

“No, that’s not negotiable yet,” the strike leader corrected her. “And I didn’t expect it to be, either. But we’re not going anywhere, and you’re not moving anyone else into this building, until he’s had an opportunity to…rethink that position.”

“You think not?”

“Not unless you want to start getting bits and pieces of Trifecta’s senior management team back as greasy spots on the street.”

“You start throwing people out of windows, and I may just decide the only chance Ms. Guernicke has is for us to get in there before you throw her out one.”

“I’ll take my chances on that. Besides, what makes you think that’s the only string to our bow?”

“I know how many people got inside with you,” Yardley said. “That tower is lousy with security cameras, you know. I know about the people you’ve got covering your entry portal—and those tribarrels of theirs won’t do squat if I decide to send in the Scorpions, by the way—and I know how many people you’ve got covering the lift banks. I even know how many people got into Ms. Guernicke’s office with you…and that you lost somebody on the way in.”

“And are you getting very much information from them now?” the strike leader inquired in an interested tone.

He almost imagined he could hear her teeth grinding together in the silence from the other end.

“Yeah, we know about the cameras,” he went on after a moment and shrugged. “There was no way to take them out before we got inside, but you’re not seeing a damned thing from them now. Which means you don’t know whether we’ve pulled SAMS out of our van—or ATWs, for that matter—or not. You don’t even know if we’ve still got Guernicke in her office or staked out across the lift bank doors. Oh, and by the way, did you know Ms. Guernicke has the master codes to access all of the building’s surveillance and environmental control systems from her desk? She was kind enough to give them to us when we insisted. So if you want to try infiltrating SWAT teams into the building, you go right ahead.”

“Listen,” Yardley said, “I’m not going to send people up there after you—not yet. But I damned well am going to secure the lower floors of that tower.”

“You try to do that and someone’s going to get hurt,” the strike leader said flatly. He was watching the feed from the tower’s ground level security cameras as he spoke. At least two companies of the Presidential Guard were advancing across Trifecta Boulevard from the parking garage. “Even if you manage to get troops inside the tower, it’s not going to buy you any edge you don’t already have. But if they keep coming, you’re going to regret the attempt.”

“Are you threatening the hostages again?” Yardley laughed harshly. “You’re not going to kill Ms. Guernicke, or even any of the other management personnel with her, until you feel a hell of a lot more threatened than that! And if you do, you lose your bargaining chips, and we come straight in however hard and fast we have to.”

“Last warning,” the strike leader told her, still watching the advancing troops. “Call them off now.”

* * *

Yardley’s eyes narrowed. His voice was flat, unwavering. In fact, there was something almost like…satisfaction in it, and alarm bells sounded in the back of her brain. But she couldn’t back off. She had to shake his nerve, destroy his confidence that he was in control of the situation, calling the tune while she had no option but to dance to it. She had to assert her ability to control the situation, and so she simply sat back, folded her arms, and watched her command vehicle’s visual displays.

* * *

“Have it your way, General,” the strike leader said, and pressed a button.

* * *

The van which had parked so quickly at street level when Air Traffic Control ordered the local airspace cleared had been abandoned with unseemly haste. The driver hadn’t even wasted any time trying to straighten it out; she’d simply left it there, dumped across three parking slots with its nose pointing out across the street at a sharp angle. It was sloppy of her, no doubt, but other vehicles had been abandoned with equal haste.

There was, however, one difference between her van and any of those other vehicles, as the Presidential Guard discovered when it disappeared in a horrendous fireball.

The weapon was technically an “improvised explosive device,” since it had been manufactured for the purpose out of readily available components by largely amateur hands. There was nothing haphazard or slipshod about it, though. A solid partition, both sides concave in shape, had been run lengthwise along the van’s generous cargo space. The outer surfaces of the partition had been coated in explosives—civilian explosive compounds stolen from construction crews, not military-grade, but amply powerful for the task in hand—and the explosives, in turn, had been coated with a thick layer of screws, old-fashioned nails, bits and pieces of scrap metal, broken glass, and chunks of ceramacrete. The van had been transformed into a huge directional mine which sent a lethal sheet of shrapnel sweeping out in both directions simultaneously.

The driver hadn’t achieved a perfect angle, but she’d come close, and the strike leader had judged his moment carefully. He caught at least ninety percent of the advancing Presidential Guard infantry in the IED’s blast area, and destruction crashed over them like a thunderbolt. The blast front swept up weapons, helmets, equipment, and body parts on its fiery breath. It shredded its victims like toys…and painted the pavement and slide-walks in ghastly sprays of blood decorated with bits and pieces of mangled flesh.

* * *

“I told you to call them off,” the voice on Yardley’s com was cold and precise. “You should’ve listened. But since you didn’t—”

He pressed a second button.

* * *

“Tiger” Braddock was astonished he was still alive. His position had been just deep enough inside the parking garage for its sturdy walls to intercept the shrapnel which had butchered his infantry. One moment, the next best thing to three hundred of his elite troops had been sweeping across Trifecta Boulevard towards their objective. The next moment, at least two hundred of them were dead and a lot more were dying. He stumbled to the garage entrance, head ringing from the force of the explosion, and peered out in horror at hell’s own landscape as men and women with no legs tried to drag themselves out of the charnel house of the boulevard on their elbows and forearms. He saw another rocking on his knees while he tried to stuff his own intestines back inside his ruptured body. Another stumbled helplessly about, hands clasped over the blind, red ruin of what had been a human face only moments before. Still others only lay there, unable to drag their mangled bodies anywhere, shrieking amid the motionless dead.

He was still trying to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened when the third van—the one parked in the garage which the strike leader had recognized just as clearly as Braddock was the perfect place to stash the Guard’s armored vehicles—exploded.

It was a much larger bomb this time, and the driver had carefully parked it directly beside the central support pillar of the garage’s entire structure.

A huge sheet of flame shot out both open sides of the garage. Fresh flame billowed as the fuel tanks of parked vehicles fireballed, joining the fury of the original explosion. Braddock flung himself down on his belly, covering his helmeted head with his arms in instinctive self-preservation. For an instant all he was aware of was the terrible, concussive force of the explosion. Then his stunned ears heard another sound—a grating, grinding rumble—and he had one more second to realize his instincts had played him false.

If he’d run out into the body-strewn nightmare of Trifecta Boulevard, he might have survived after all.

The entire parking garage came down, puffing out concentric rings of smoke and dust as its floors collapsed, one by one, into the roaring inferno which had engulfed “Tiger” Braddock’s entire regiment.

* * *

“Looks like you need another régiment, General,” the icy voice on Olivia Yardley’s com observed.

“Pity about that.”